Blog about (Web-) Programming, Graphics and Games.

28.08.2010

Canvas graph demo, Usecase: Football results

On the left there is a interactive canvas graph demo, showing football results. You can switch highlighted graphs by mouse-clicking on the corresponding description. Since all the javascript is written in one line, all content of this blogpost could be uploaded to blogspot, there is no iframe needed here. Soon there will be a more advanced canvas demo and I'm also working on a webgl+bullet.js demo. Stay tuned! :)
Update: I made the graphs animate and added functionality: If the mouse moves over the graph, detail information is displayed.

14.08.2010

Twitter client concept: Refer arcs

In my current twitter client, to follow conversations between users, I often have to scroll and search to find the corresponding tweets. To make this process more comfortable (especially the search part), I introduced refer arcs into a twitter client which visually connect tweets that probably refer to each other (replies, retweets).
On the right there is an animated gif, which demonstrates this technique. The updated twitter client ('Twaja') will be downloadable soon.

Thoughts on other stuff. Three recent (in my opinion) questionable developments in computation:End of rant. :)

01.08.2010

What I like about Javascript (compared to Java)

This list was assembled, while I was coding some Javascript projects (see blogposts below), and is of course only a subjective view:
  • dynamic typing: simpler declarations, no casts, no interfaces, less keywords, simpler syntax (but I see possible drawbacks: its may be more error prone, and probably less runtime performant)
  • "this" is mandatory to access object-variables, in java its optional. This is more clear semantics and promotes the use of local variables.
  • simple and powerfull Array and Hashtable (instead of Java's multitude of Array,Vector,List,Collections..)
  • prototype based object system. its more flexible than javas class based system, e.g. you can add methods to existing objects.
  • last but not least: it runs everywhere in the browser, quite like java, but in a more straightforward and powerfull way (direct dom access, not like a plugin).
Still, Java keeps being great, but above points make Javascript very much interesting, imho.